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Thursday, March 7, 2013

Still slowly recoverring from being sick. Last week Bob was calling me "Typhoid Samara" and I had lots of people telling me I looked "tired" or "not so well" [read: awful]. But this week my energy is up and the tissue consumption is down, but the best sign of recovery came just now in the form of a compliment from Bob:

Well, you look better... I knew you were too young to die. You know, you don't want to become one of those tragic figures in a Victorian novel.

Samara, your essay was insightful and revealing. Revealing because I did not know you viewed yourself as a cog sometimes. Not that this is altogether surprising. I would submit that most people view themselves as cogs at some point.

I too wonder when I graduate whether I will succumb to the spirit of being a cog. But I think that the idea of being a cog spawns mainly from seeing money as the goal. This is something that God has been talking to me about lately. It is not about what I do or how much money I make while doing it, as much as it is about am I doing what God wants me to do right now. Any money I get, I get from him. He is my provider not my job and not the capitalist system.

Your essay was insightful because it identified some of the flaws with capitalism. These flaws include, the idea that people are just part of the system and the whole goal of the system is to make it go faster and faster and make more things more quickly which equates to a cheaper price.

But Marx would not have been so happy that you pointed out that certain cogs are more important than others. This begins to destroy his whole theory of the repressed worker. It does this by identifying the fact that goods cannot be identified as being valuable purely because of how much labor has been put into the object. If different value can be put on different skills than workers cannot be repressed as Marx supposes that they could be. This is the argument that Joseph Schumpter makes in is book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

But that is probably more than you wanted to know. Capitalism is flawed but it is also amazing too. You have to remember socialism would most likely never have created an industrial revolution. That is not to say that capitalism created the industrial revolution, it was more the enlightenment and mercantilism. But capitalism at least could have fostered an environment in which the industrial revolution could have occurred.

But getting back to you. You are so much more than just a cog. Life is not just a machine. God has a wonderful journey for you to live out. You may not see where that adventure is taking you right now, but you will. This sickness will not last forever. There will be brighter days beyond feeling sick. Your life is not a series of transactions of time for paper. You are valuable for who you are.

P.S. Marx cannot and should not be hated for wanting something better than what existed when he was alive. But I will always hate, till the day I die how his ideas ruined the lives of so very many people. His ideas are deplorable and dangerous and they cannot be the solution. Utopia is great, but man cannot simply design utopia by fiddling with economic principles.